In general, homes contain various wired/wireless networks, such as DTV, RGB, Coaxial Cable, 1394, wired/wireless Ethernet, USB connection, etc. Most of these networks contain a limited number of devices that share the same communication protocol. In effort to consolidate these wired/wireless networks in a home, a number of UWB groups proposed various protocols (ex. WiMedia) to wirelessly connect these wired/wireless devices. However, these proposals limit the physical communication range of each wireless network, which can be defined as a ‘short-range wired/wireless network’ cluster. Its operation range is about 10 meters or less, and each cluster operates independently to each other. In fact, the most home (or personal) networking protocols do not address the inter-operability of these clusters.
Furthermore, the current WHAN/WPAN protocols actually promote the privacy of each ‘short-range wired/wireless network’ cluster so that each network is presented as a person's private network.
Thus, the currently proposed wireless network protocols are not capable of providing a seamless wireless home communication network since wireless devices located in a house can be more than 10 meters apart. This means that two or more ‘short-range wired/wireless network’ clusters are required to cover the physical space of a home or a small office.
The WHAN/WPAN protocols also do not have provision for dynamically constructing data pipelines to support dynamically changing wireless network activities in home (ex. watching a movie while making a video copy).
There are three current proposals that are presented by working groups to address the aforementioned problems.
The first proposed solution is constructing a home network that is similar to the cell phone network.
In the cell phone network, the cell (cluster) base stations are stationary and permanent. Since theses base stations can easily connected with various methods, any wireless mobile device can communicate with each other via one or more base stations, which can be connected via wired or wireless medium.
The second proposal is employing the currently developed 802.11n protocol to connect various home networks.
Another suggestion is using the 802.15.3.c, which is the next generation high data rate UWB that operates in the frequency range of 57-64 GHz and the maximum data rate of 800 Mbps-2 Gbps.
However, these solutions do not work for the following reasons.
The cell phone network protocol could not be used to connect mobile devices in various wireless network clusters.
Since the cell phone network does not allow dynamically varying through-put rate and dynamically changing communication channel as the WHAN and WPAN protocols require, the concept of the cell phone network protocol would not directly apply to establish a practical home network that consists of a number of WHANs and WPANs.
The 802.11n protocol would be able to directly connect various WHAN of WPAN networks. However, the 802.11n protocol alone is not a viable candidate for connecting the home networks since it is only capable of supporting a data transfer rate of 100 Mbps, which is much slower than the data rate required to support the HDMI/HDPC protocol (6 Gbps).
The 802.15.3c data rate is enough to support the current home entertainment networks (HDTV requires ˜20 Mbps). However, it alone does not provide wide enough data pipeline to support the HDMI/HDPC protocol, which is definitely becoming the de-facto standard of home entertainment networks since the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) supports the HDMI/HDPC protocol.
It is therefore an object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that provides connection among any wireless devices, including mobile devices that may belong to different WHAN/WPAN clusters.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that provides connection among any wireless devices that are located outside of the communication range of each WHAN/WPAN cluster.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that provides a point-to-point connection between any two wireless devices regardless of the distance between them.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that supports high data rate transfers among any wireless devices either within the same cluster or spread out among many different clusters.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that supports high data rate transfer among any wireless devices regardless of the distance between them.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that supports simultaneous transfers of data between different pairs of wireless devices regardless of the distance between each pair of devices.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network system that supports broad-casting or multi-casting of data from a wireless device to the other wireless devices in the home network.
It is another object of the invention to produce a practical wireless home network that dynamically increases the data bandwidth by occupying unused communication channels.